Yale University law professor Amy Chua writes in
World on Fire that "free market democracy"
has an Achilles` heel: market-dominant minorities.
The disproportionate success attained by market-dominant
minorities foments ethnic hatreds. Democracy provides
the envious and resentful majority the means to strike
at the successful minority, making conflict inherent in
"free market democracy."

What is to be done? Chua is too realistic to offer
pie-in-the-sky alternatives to markets and democracy.
After relating examples of how "free market democracy"
works against itself in countries with multi-ethnic
populations, she recommends that market-dominant
minorities protect themselves with image management and
good works. In the last line of her book, Chua reaches
the conclusion: "It is difficult to see, in any
event, how a little generosity and humility could
possibly hurt."

It is difficult to see how such a weak conclusion
justifies her publisher`s claim that World on Fire
is that rare book that "gets everyone thinking in a
new way." If Chua or her editor were aware that her
ground had been more expertly ploughed by Alexis de
Tocqueville,
Thomas Sowell, and
Peter Bauer, Chua`s knowledge of ethnic and tribal
conflicts might have been put to better use.

Having nothing to offer but a report on ethnic and
tribal conflicts, Chua tries to compensate by connecting
globalism to market-dominant minorities. She writes that
globalism disproportionately benefits these minorities
and thus exacerbates hatreds and political instability.
She blames the U.S. government and International
Monetary Fund for contributing to ethnic conflict by
promoting free market democracy throughout the
non-Western world.

In this indirect way Chua takes issue with the
neoconservative view, that exporting free markets and
democracy to other countries will increase peace and
prosperity throughout the developing world. Chua,
however, seems no less interventionist-minded than
neoconservatives, and as she neither believes that a
government-run economy produces better results than the
market nor that authoritarianism is preferable to
democracy, she fails to challenge the neoconservative
view.

Chua is on shaky ground when she blames
market-dominant minorities on globalism. Such minorities
long predate globalism and exist in lands that can by no
stretch of the imagination be labeled free market or
democratic. "Free market democracy" is an intellectual
construct that nowhere exists.

At times Chua`s book reads like an aimless rant
against free markets and laissez-faire
capitalism. Perhaps she is letting off emotional steam
over inequalities that reason tells her are intractable,
based as they are in historical, cultural, and genetic
differences. The left-wing is frustrated by the
realization that society cannot be remade unless
history, the gene pool, and human nature itself can be
recast.

If truth be known, political correctness prevents
Chua from bringing her knowledge of ethnic conflicts to
bear on multiculturalism where it belongs. She is honest
and bold enough to acknowledge the reality of ethnic
hatreds, but her supposition that such hatreds are
market driven is merely a repetition of 19th century
Marxist economic determinism.

Certainly the U.S. government and the IMF should take
care not to export policies that worsen ethnic
conflicts, but the more powerful conclusion to be drawn
from Chua`s material—a conclusion that Chua studiously
avoids—is that the U.S., Europe, the U.K., Australia,
Canada, and New Zealand should immediately cease and
desist from reconstructing themselves as multi-ethnic
societies. Accentuating ethnic conflict abroad is
stupid, even criminal, but it is insane to import
unassimiliable ethnic groups into Western countries,
thus replicating in the West the Third World conflicts
that Chua so terrifyingly describes.

Chua`s report on ethnic conflict supports the undrawn
conclusion, revolutionary for the political Left, that
successful states are states with homogeneous
populations. Even in ethnically or racially homogeneous
states, ideologies such as communism can create class
conflicts that are as murderous as ethnic conflicts.
Life can be dangerous enough without a heterogeneous
population seething with grievances. When a political
system has to cope simultaneously with race, gender,
ethnic, cultural, and class Marxism, social and
political instability are guaranteed. Multiculturalism,
not "free market democracy," is setting the world on
fire.